All Blog Posts (802)

It was my third time to participate in the annual International Conference on Applications of Anthropology in Business, organized by Robert Tian Guang and held at a venue in China, and my second time to visit Jishou University, which is located in the Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture in Hunan Province in the west of China. The first two…

Being a socio-cultural anthropologist, I conducted my post-graduate research and field work in a rural area where young people and their leisure activities was my core interest. The study revealed numerous aspect which possibly are ignored in the usual way but it was surprising to learn how minor happenings even influenced the life of youth,

The reversal of Doxa ("opinions/metaphysics") and Episteme ("truth/knowledge") happened around the time of the early 20th century. The theory of relativity seems to be the discovery that sparked it, but really this theoretical discover is merely the "best example" of the reversal in knowledge types that I am pointing out.

Once Newtonian physics lost its bearing as being Truth -- which coincided with the scientific method being formulated as a method for truth -- incidentally, we also…

I admit that there is no perfect process for doing ethnographic fieldwork. And, trying to find a computer program or application that is robust enough to handle all the varied tasks necessary in fieldwork, I don’t really think exists (although there are many out there that claim to be the definitive research tool for qualitative or quantitative research). In the years that I have been doing fieldwork, I have figured out a method that sort of works for me…

I think much of politics stems from identity construction. Most discussions about identity are approached from the question of the Other -- include them or teach them or change them. But really, any position of otherness must be mediated by what the Self is. The self mediating the self is the "invisible" point of reference that creates this initial distortion.

Post race isn't exactly the same as post identity. Even if it's a class distinction or, say, identifying as a "punk" which…

After the enlightenment, people started to seriously make a distinction that how they distinguished what they really knew from what was really going on around them. The actual knowledge, epistemes, were favored over "opinions" or doxa. The debate that surrounded that distinction amid the turmoil of increasing technology and religious unrest eventually flipped around: doxa became the norm with epistemes being questioned as being attainable. With this flip, after the revolution of…

Well, it’s that time of year when prospective grad students around the country are anxiously pacing around their mailboxes waiting for responses from all the PhD programs they applied to. Many are wondering who accepted them, who rejected them, and, of course, if they got funding. That’s the big question. Getting a full-funding offer is the highest mark of acceptance and application success. It’s like getting the golden seal of academic and departmental approval. It means you’re…

Amazing! I am surprised and grateful that my American Ethnologist essay, “Writing Against Identity Politics,” has gotten over 1,000 views on academia.edu in a little over a year. This is on top of over 2,000 viewers and subscribers on Facebook and other educational, non-profit sites. I am glad that the word is getting out about the bureaucratic machine as a system of divine torture.…

Serendipitously, the entertainment section in this morning's Japan Times carries an article about an Indie band, three young Japanese women, called Crunch. One of them, Noriyo Hotta says,

"For example, take 'Mori no Naka,' the first track on the album. This song was influenced by Radiohead, especially the songs 'Jigsaw Falling' and 'There There,' and a funk tune by Japanese rock band Jagatara called 'Tango.' But I was also inspired by a book about the Yanomami tribe in the Amazon.… Continue

Just found an interesting piece titled "Good Group Think" on eighteen chains.com. Resurrects some shrewd observations by Karl Mannheim, from Ideology and Utopia. Most of what we think we learn from others. We add a bit and pass it on. Tracing the routes is a project called the sociology of knowledge. Enjoy. Reflect. Respond. Pass it on.

Last night I was at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan in Tokyo attending a "Book Break." The book in question was Japan Copes with Calamity: Ethnographies of the Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disasters of March 2011, ed. by Tom Gill, David Slater, and Brigitte Steger. I don't know Brigitte, but Tom and David are old friends. Both are anthropologists, one from the…

Anthropologist and statistician S.M. Shirokogoroff in 1930s made an attempt to understand ethnic identity as an object of natural sciences ( incl funct anthropology ). He uses elementary equations of statistical thermodynamic in order to describe ethnogenesis as processes of statistical self-organization. In contrast, today social anthropologists and governments behave like they already had found complete proof of theorem on social nature of ethnic identity and all counterexamples are…